Like most of you, I read the interview in Friday’s Daily Telegraph during which Manly power-broker Scott Penn addressed the bountiful rumours that Geoff Toovey, under fire after a disastrous start to the season for the Manly Sea Eagles, and basically indicated that rugby league is a results-based business, and that Toovey needs results – read: wins – to keep his job.
Under any other circumstances, I’d agree whole-heartedly with that notion, but there are extenuating circumstances in 2015 that Penn, rather worryingly, didn’t mention. Toovey’s gig has gotten exponentially harder with every passing week as more and more important players are sent to the sideline. In fact, in a game, Manly’s All Injured team could probably trouble the team that’s currently on the field.
Promising youngster Clinton Gutherson did his ACL inside the first twenty minutes in Manly’s season opener against Parramatta, opening a floodgate of injuries. In recent weeks, Steve Matai and Jamie Lyon – an undoubted talisman for the team – have spent time on the sidelines, joining key forward Feleti Mateo, Josh Starling and Brenton Lawrence. Brett Stewart is now facing an undisclosed number of weeks on the sideline, and Saturday night’s loss to Penrith saw gun rookie Tom Trbojevic and Jesse Sene-Lefao did not return in the second half with an ankle sprain and shoulder injury respectively. Where I come from, that’s called being ‘ravaged’ with injury.
Say what you will of the brittleness of Manly’s forward pack and the disinterest from it’s halves pairing, chalking up wins in the ultra-competitive world that the NRL in 2015 most definitely has become isn’t easy at the best of times, and it’s damn near impossible when some of your best talent is sitting on the sidelines, and destined to be there for an extended period of time.
No coach, not Wayne Bennett or Michael Maguire or Trent Robinson, would fare much better than Toovey has under the current situation. It’s going to get worse for Manly, who will be without Stewart for about a month, and there’s no telling whether Trbojevic or Sene-Lefao will front up next Friday against the Bulldogs. Jamie Lyon hasn’t trained since his injury, so the veteran captain is probably at long odds for this coming weekend, too.
A loss on Friday night at ANZ Stadium will drop Manly to 1-6 on the season, and Toovey’s hot seat will probably start to roast him. Unfairly, if you ask me. Of course, there is more going on at Manly than just a simple matter of wins and losses. Politics has infected the goings-on at the club, and there appear to be forces at play who want to see the back end of Toovey.
To those people, I say this: firing Toovey now, with the extent of the injury crisis, is going to alienate a massive chunk of the loyal Manly fan base. Things are undeniably grim at the moment, and the inglorious jettisoning of a club legend in the midst of a bad season isn’t going to make things better. If anything, the club is going to lose more face with it’s fans. Most importantly, Toovey deserves better.
It’s not like Toovey has been a horrible coach before. He coached the squad to a Grand Final in 2013, and into the finals, once more, in 2014. This year was always going to be a defining one for the club, following the losses of Anthony Watmough, Glenn Stewart and Jason King from the forward pack, and the uncertainty surrounding the future of Daly Cherry-Evans and Kieran Foran, and had Manly been as horrible as they are now with a full complement of players, then I’d probably be advocating – or, at least leaning towards – getting rid of Toovey.
Fact of the matter is, there are far too many players on the sidelines to get a fair indication of where Toovey might’ve coached the team this season. Cooler heads need to prevail here, despite the board’s apparent loggerheads situation with their coach. It’s unfair to Toovey, an undisputed Manly legend, to make him the scapegoat for a year that’s been cruelled by an injury toll that’s as bad as any I can remember in recent memory.
There will be plenty of change in 2016. Foran and Cherry-Evans will be gone, with new halves in their place, and hopefully some of the money saved from the departure Foran and DCE will be used to buy some better forwards to complement what’s still a pretty dangerous backline, and then we’ll have a better idea what Toovey is capable of, a fairer assessment of his ability to get the most out of his best players. Pretty hard to do that at the moment, when the bulk of his best players are sitting in the stands, watching on, basically helpless to do anything about the team’s plight.
To pull the trigger and fire a Manly legend during the club’s toughest patch in a decade or more would make the board room operators down at Brookvale less popular than they already are, and it would send a pretty clear signal to fans that the boardroom was, as the rumours have suggested, indeed pursuing a vendetta against a loyal servant of the club who, this season, has done his level best under the most difficult and trying of circumstances. I wonder if Toovey’s replacement could realistically do any better, confronted with the same injury list. In fact, I highly doubt it.
Toovey needs to be given a chance in 2016. To fire him any sooner would be close to a travesty. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail…but this is Manly, where cooler heads don’t often operate, so I’m worried.
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